The Gilded Rune

Chapter Eleven

Torrin was tired of waiting. For the remainder of the night, he’d sat in the inn, nursing an ale and using it as an excuse to nod off at his table and get some much-needed rest. Fortunately, the barkeep hadn’t thrown him out. Unfortunately, Imyr hadn’t yet returned to tell him how the spellsong had gone, and whether Eralynn had been cured. Torrin had eventually tried to return to the grove-filled cavern, but its doors were locked, and none of the people he’d spoken to had known how to contact Val’tissa. Torrin had considered trying to force his way in, but decided against it. With Eralynn’s life hanging in the balance, he didn’t want to anger the dark elf clerics.

Torrin restlessly walked the canyon floor of Sundasz, watching the orange-pink light of dawn filter down through the fissure that led to the surface. Several of the doors he passed had the hourglass-shaped rune for Q painted on them, and the distinctive smell of the stoneplague leaked out from behind them. As before, there were few people out on the main thoroughfares. Most were likely cowering in their residences, fearful of the stoneplague.

Torrin needed a way to pass the time, something that would occupy his fretting mind.

Absently, he touched the coin pouch that hung at his belt. It held few coins-that was why he’d been forced to doze in the inn’s taproom, rather than in a soft bed-but it did hold something even more precious: the runestone that had conveyed him to Eralynn. What with the stoneplague, Torrin had set aside his quest to find the Soulforge. But with time on his hands and desperately needing something else to think about, perhaps it was time to pluck at that thread.

The Delvers didn’t have a chapter in Sundasz, but the settlement did have a library dedicated to the scholar god Dugmaren Brightmantle, the patron deity of Delvers. Poking through its texts would keep Torrin’s mind occupied. He made his way there.

The library was deep inside one of the canyon walls, at the bottom of a spiral staircase. Its low ceiling forced Torrin to stoop as he entered a room containing a marble statue of Dugmaren Brightmantle. The god was seated cross-legged atop a runestone, staring down as if reading it. One finger pointed to the word “truth.”

“May my wanderings bring me wisdom,” Torrin intoned as he bowed to the statue. As he crossed the room, he bent down to stroke the edge of the runestone on which the god sat. His fingers slid along a groove worn by countless other hands.

The entrance to the main part of the library was a diamond-shaped doorway. The inscription framing it emitted a low hiss of magic-a ward that prevented visitors from removing the texts. The doorway opened into a large, hexagonal room with a high ceiling, illuminated by magically glowing spheres of light that bobbed in mid-air. The room smelled of old leather, dust, and ink. The outer walls were lined with tall wooden bookshelves and rolling ladders to access the books and scrolls written by humans and elves, shelved up high. Lower down were drawers that held the baked-clay tablets preferred by dwarves. A second floor-to-ceiling hexagonal arrangement of shelves stood just inside the first, and a third inside that. Narrow openings pierced the shelves, none much higher than a dwarf’s head, connecting each hexagonal aisle to the next, and on into the heart of the library.

Torrin wandered along the outermost aisle, getting a sense of how it was organized. Or rather, disorganized. Books were stacked haphazardly on the floor, in towering piles that threatened to tumble over as Torrin squeezed past. A runic tablet clattered as Torrin accidentally kicked it. Like the rest of Sundasz, the library was a disorderly place. Torrin had no idea which section might hold the texts dealing with earth nodes and teleportation rituals.

He heard a murmuring, deeper in the library. He bent down to peer through one of the openings that led to the center of the room and saw three figures seated on stools around a hexagonal table. Two were dwarves, but the third was too tall, judging by the way the knees bumped up against the underside of the table.

One of the tallfolk, at Dugmaren Brightmantle’s library? That boded well-the two dwarves likely wouldn’t question Torrin’s presence, either. Crouching, he made his way to the center of the room.

One of the dwarves was a cleric of Dugmaren Brightmantle. He wore the order’s distinctive bright purple sash and a silver pendant in the shape of an open book. He was elderly, with sparse white hair, and his beard was tucked into a beard bag. Gold rings adorned several of his ink-stained fingers. He briefly glanced at Torrin, then returned his attention to the book he was reading.

The second dwarf had the look of an adventurer with his frayed clothes and weather-stained knapsack. He was younger, with unruly black hair and a short beard with at least two-dozen braids that twisted at odd angles from his cheeks and chin, like rearing snakes. He had several maps spread across the table in front of him. As Torrin approached, he pulled one of them over a section of the largest map, as if he didn’t want Torrin to see what he’d been looking at.

“Greetings,” Torrin said to the dwarves. “Are either of you Delvers, by any chance?”

Snake-beard stared at Torrin’s beard, with its tinkling silver hammers. “Who wants to know?” he asked.

“Torrin Ironstar,” Torrin replied. He turned slightly, so that they could see the D on his own backpack. “Member in good standing of the Order of Delvers, Eartheart chapter. I’m looking for information on earth nodes. Can you tell me what section of the library holds texts on that subject?”

Snake-beard responded by narrowing his eyes. He nudged the top sheaf of vellum a little further over the map he’d been studying. “Find it yourself.”

Torrin felt his face flush. Such rudeness from a fellow dwarf!

“Aisle one, right two, third shelf from the bottom,” the third man at the table said.

Torrin turned. The speaker was yet another dark elf. Sundasz was thick with them, it seemed. The fellow was tall and thin, even for an elf, with tightly kinked hair that stood out from his scalp in a steel gray fuzz. He was dressed in a black robe with thread-of-silver embroidery that kept shifting from one geometric pattern to the next: a wizard’s magical robe. He had a number of runic tablets spread out on the table, but instead of reading them he kept rearranging them, sliding them back and forth across the table. He slid one midway between the others and spoke a word in what sounded like High Drow. The tablet rose into the air and started to spin. The dark elf stared at it, nodding and muttering to himself.

Torrin stared at him. Had he, like Val’tissa and Imyr, once been drow? Torrin’s hackles rose; he’d have to be careful around the fellow.

The cleric glanced up from his book. “You can trust Zarifar,” he said. “He’s as close to a bibliothecary as we’ve got.”

“Are you serious?” Torrin asked incredulously. He could understand the tallfolk races patronizing the library, perhaps even serving as its unofficial bibliothecary. They were in Sundasz, after all. But not someone of a race that-if Val’tissa was to believed-had once been drow.

Still staring at the spinning tablet, the dark elf flicked his fingers in a complex gesture.

This way, a voice whispered from a different exit. Torrin blinked in surprise, then realized the dark elf wizard had created the magical voice. This way, it said again.

Torrin swallowed down his distrust. If one of Dugmaren Brightmantle’s clerics vouched for the dark elf, that bode well.

Torrin ducked through the exit and followed the whispering voice to a section of the library in the outermost aisle. It led him to the second wall to the right of the main entrance, then faded away. There he found a handful of texts with titles like Magical Pathways of Faerun and Forces of the Four Elements. A leather-bound volume of the Delver’s Tome — the one dealing primarily with wayfinding and mapmaking-was also in the section, shelved separately from the rest of that great work. Torrin picked it up as well. As he did so, a couple of smaller books tumbled from the same shelf. Torrin put one of them carefully back into place, but couldn’t find the second. It was lost, he presumed, somewhere in the jumble on the floor.

Torrin gathered up an armful of scrolls and books, balancing the tablets he’d chosen on top, and returned to the center of the library. He placed the pile opposite the suspicious black-bearded dwarf. Torrin didn’t want to rile him further.

The dark elf lowered the spinning tablet. Then he drew glowing lines across the tabletop, and Torrin could detect the faint smell of charring wood. It drew a stern look from the cleric, who tsk-tsked and shook his head. The dark elf ignored him. The cleric half rose from his stool, then sat down again, as if deciding that chastising a wizard wasn’t a good idea. Snake-beard rolled up the map he’d been concealing from Torrin and shoved it under one arm. He slunk away down one of the aisles, grumbling.

Torrin tried to concentrate on his reading, but couldn’t. The wizard had snuffed out the glowing lines with a wave of his hand, and was holding up each of the tablets in turn and striking it with a tuning fork. The soft ping, ping, ping sound was exasperating, especially after a night of little sleep and much worry.

“Do you mind?” Torrin blurted out.

The wizard stared at him without blinking, saying nothing.

The cleric’s head jerked up. He glanced back and forth between Torrin and the wizard. Then he eased his chair back from the table, its wooden legs scraping the stone floor, and looked as if he were getting ready to leave. Torrin suddenly wondered if interrupting the wizard had been a healthy thing to do.

“Mind,” the dark elf repeated. He cocked his head to the side and lifted his left hand. Torrin shied back, but the wizard didn’t touch him. Instead, he pointed with a slender finger at the Ironstar symbol on the bracers Torrin wore.

“Your mind matches that mark,” he said in a soft voice.

Torrin blinked. “I… I am a dwarf, it’s true,” he said. He leaned forward. “You could sense that?”

The wizard’s fingers traced a star in the air. “Patterns,” he said.

The cleric snorted. Relaxing once more, he returned his attention to his reading.

The wizard touched the bracer on Torrin’s left arm, his finger briefly tracing the groove that had been gouged into the iron during Torrin and Eralynn’s scramble to get away from the red dragon. “Patterns,” he repeated.

Torrin inclined his head in a bow. “Torrin Ironstar,” he said, introducing himself a second time. “And you are…?”

“Zarifar,” the wizard replied, nodding at the tablets he’d been playing with. “A geomancer.”

Torrin hesitated. He was loath to trust a former drow, yet the wizard who studied earth magic might be able to tell him a few things. And for all Torrin knew, the Morndinsamman had caused their paths to cross. “Do you mind if I ask you some questions?” he asked.

The dark elf gave a vague wave of his hand. Torrin hoped that it meant yes. “What do you know about earth nodes?” he asked.

Zarifar smiled. “Everything.”

“How do they work?” asked Torrin. “How do they allow people to teleport, I mean.”

“You mean why do they work,” the wizard said. He stared across the room, as if looking at something far beyond it. “The lines. The angles they form where they cross. It’s all… in the numbers. The equations, the formulae. The vertex, and how the chords of the circle and the tangential lines align.”

The cleric chuckled and caught Torrin’s eye. “You’re sorry you asked, I’ll wager,” he said.

Torrin ignored him. “Could you explain that again, in lay terms?” he asked.

“I was a teacher once, you know,” Zarifar said. “At the College of Ancient Arcana, in Sshamath.”

The drow city. Torrin struggled to keep the distaste from his expression. He needed information from Zarifar.

Torrin was setting aside his principles a lot lately. But it was for the greater good. He might learn something from the wizard that would help Kier-help everyone. Surely Moradin would understand.

“What I want to know,” Torrin told the wizard, “is how to more reliably activate the teleportation magic of an earth node. I find that sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t. Could that be due to a warding ritual, or some magical device that blocks teleportation, carried by the person I’m trying to teleport to?”

The cleric spoke again. “So now you’re a wizard, as well as a Delver?”

“I’m no wizard,” Torrin answered over his shoulder. “Although I am a dwarf. But that’s another tale.”

The cleric chuckled and set his book down, giving Torrin his full attention. “This gets better and better,” he said.

“I hoped to find the answer in these texts,” Torrin said, gesturing at the stack of books in front of him, “but the solution still eludes me. I was hoping that you might offer some suggestions. You must know a thing or two about teleportation.”

“Doors within doors,” Zarifar said. He placed his palms, fingers spread, each touching their counterpart on the opposite hand. “The patterns must match precisely. If they don’t-” he shifted one hand slightly, so his fingers were no longer lined up “-there’s only emptiness where an alignment should be.”

Torrin nodded respectfully. He already knew about the linked portals wizards could create: how the runes around each of the circles had to be inscribed in exactly the right order, using the same color of chalk, to forge a link from one to the next. But he was no wizard.

“What I want to know is this,” he continued. “Supposing someone wasn’t a wizard, but he had a magical device that could activate an earth node’s magic, and allow him to teleport? Could he go anywhere he wanted, or would the destination have to meet certain conditions?”

“You have such a device?” the cleric asked, his eyes glittering.

Torrin hesitated. If the fellow had been anything other than a cleric of the Delver’s patron god, Torrin might have hesitated. But he was a fellow dwarf, and one of the brotherhood. Torrin could trust him.

The cleric obviously sensed Torrin’s hesitation. He introduced himself. “Rathorn Battlehammer, son of Horatio Battlehammer and grandson of Rornathoin the Third,” he said. “A pleasure to make your acquaintance.”

“Torrin Ironstar,” Torrin repeated, clasping the cleric’s arm in the traditional dwarven greeting. “And no, I don’t have such a device-but I know of one.”

Rathorn chuckled. “No need for subterfuge,” he told Torrin. “As I said before, you can trust Zarifar. He’s no rogue, and he’s as honorable as any of the stout folk. I swear it, by the gleam in Dugmaren’s eye.” He touched the holy symbol that hung about his neck.

Torrin took a deep breath. “All right, then,” he said, after one last wary glance at the wizard. “Yes, I have such a device.” He pulled the runestone from his pouch and showed it to the cleric.

Rathorn studied it a moment, then pushed it back to Torrin. “Interesting. But Zarifar knows more about these things than I do, though I am chagrined to admit it.”

Zarifar started to reach for the runestone.

“It also draws spellfire,” Torrin warned.

The wizard’s hand jerked to a stop. He sat back, leaving the runestone where it was.

“But only when it’s in an earth node,” Torrin continued.

“Spellfire,” Zarifar said softly. He moved one finger back and forth across the table in a seemingly aimless fashion, mumbling to himself in a low voice, speaking in drow. He stared dreamily up at the ceiling.

Torrin waited while the wizard mused.

“Not possible,” Zarifar said abruptly, his hand jerking to a halt.

“What isn’t?” asked Torrin.

Zarifar traced lines across the table with his finger, each line ending at the tablet he’d spun in the air earlier. “Magic follows lines,” he said. “Spellfire…” He lifted his hand suddenly from the table and waggled his fingers. “Does not.”

Torrin gritted his teeth.

Rathorn chuckled. “What Zarifar means is that the lines of magical energy that come together at the locations we call ‘earth nodes’ each run along a fixed course through the earth,” he explained. “Spellfire, on the other hand, is wild magic that can neither be constrained nor channelled. It explodes into this realm at random, disfiguring flesh and grossly distorting spells. It is a force of chaos, and as such would be utterly antithetical to the tightly controlled and constrained magic of an earth node. That’s what Zarifar is trying to say-isn’t that right, Zarifar?”

The mage nodded down at one of the runestones on the table. “Order,” he said, flipping it over, blank side up. “Disorder.” Then he paused, and stared hard at the back of the tablet. “And yet… patterns, within the grain of the stone itself.” He seemed to have forgotten that Torrin was even there. He flipped the tablet faceup again and mumbled to himself.

“Yet channelling spellfire is possible,” Torrin insisted. He thought of the blue fire that crackled through Eralynn’s hands. “The spellscarred do it all the time when they work their magic. Why couldn’t a magical runestone do the same?”

“Impossible,” Rathorn said. He was obviously one of those dwarves whose tightly tied beliefs were impossible to unknot. “Next you’ll be telling me it’s possible to wring water from a stone.”

Torrin smiled and said, “Funny you should say that.” He lifted his pack and pulled out a stone he’d collected from Araumycos, long before he became a Delver. He carried the stone around with him still, as a souvenir. It was about the size of a walnut, and porous, like volcanic rock. Torrin shook it, then held it above the table. A dribble of water trickled out-more water than the holes alone could have held. The water puddled on the table and dribbled down onto the floor, prompting a frown from Rathorn.

Zarifar’s attention was immediately captured. “A rock gourd,” he said.

Torrin nodded. It was one area of geomancy in which he was well versed. “Rock gourds are valuable, if they’re large enough,” he said. “Kind of like a never-empty waterskin. But this one’s hardly big enough to quench a mouse’s thirst. Still, the point is made.”

Rathorn folded his book shut. His cheeks were pink above the beard bag. He stood. “That’s enough for me,” he said. “Good night, Zarifar.”

The dark elf didn’t answer. He was still staring at the rock gourd, his lips moving silently as he counted the drops falling from it. One finger moved downward, drip by drip, as he traced their fall.

“Good night, Delver Torrin,” the cleric added. “And… good luck with your quest for knowledge.” With that, Rathorn took his leave.

Torrin scrambled to his feet and bowed. He realized he’d embarrassed the cleric, for which he was sorry. But lately, it seemed even dwarf clerics didn’t have all the answers. As Rathorn left, Torrin turned back to the dark elf, who’d fallen silent.

Zarifar stared off into space, one hand idly playing with the tablet he’d been spinning earlier. “It just might be possible,” he said.

“What?” Torrin asked.

“Channelling spellfire,” replied the drow. He nodded at the runestone. “Grooves cut deep in stone expose the patterns within. Spellfire could leak into them and flow, like water through a trough. But only if the caster dug deep.” He pointed at Torrin’s chest. “Deep inside himself.”

Torrin stood for a moment, lost in thought. “Emotion?” he guessed.

Zarifar nodded.

So that was what triggered the runestone’s magic when it was within an earth node. Strong emotion. The first time, it had been Torrin’s fear and his desperate need to be safe, to be home. The second time, it had been his concern about Eralynn. But the runestone hadn’t worked when he’d tried to find Vadyr, despite the fact that Torrin’s hatred for him smoldered. That emotion should have been enough to carry Torrin past any magical wards the rogue had surrounded himself with. Yet it hadn’t.

That mystery notwithstanding, Torrin was making progress. The Dwarffather himself, it would seem, had steered him to Sundasz, the library, and a meeting with the strange dark elf. For that, Torrin gave praise. He was one step further along the path that he hoped would save Kier.

Zarifar yawned. He pushed his stool back from the table, as though getting ready to leave.

“I have one more question,” Torrin said hurriedly. “If you’ll indulge me?”

Zarifar had half-risen, but the stones seemed to catch his attention once more. He sat down again and began lining them up in a column, largest to smallest.

“When I used the runestone and it drew spellfire,” Torrin said, “something else happened. Gold dripped from the ceiling of the earth node cavern. The first time, there was an explanation. A red dragon was attacking, and I assumed its breath had melted a vein of gold. But the second time I used the runestone, gold also dripped from the ceiling. What might have caused that?”

“Gold,” Zarifar said, not looking up. His finger traced a line through the water left on the table by the rock gourd, dragging a wet smear across the wood. “Molten gold. Flowing. Spellfire, flowing. Patterns atop patterns.”

Abruptly, Zarifar tapped the wet finger against one of the books Torrin had taken from the stacks. “This one,” he said. “Page two hundred and sixty-four.” He pushed the tablets he’d aligned into an untidy pile and stood. Before Torrin could protest, he exited the center of the library and was gone, leaving without so much as a farewell.

Torrin picked up the book the wizard had indicated. It was a small book, its leather binding flaking with age. It was titled Moradin’s Mysteries and had a hammer and anvil, symbols of the Dwarffather, embossed on the cover.

Torrin frowned. He didn’t remember pulling it from the stacks.

He opened the book carefully. The vellum pages were loose in their bindings, spotted with age, and musty smelling. Several were missing, and others were hanging by their binding threads. Page two hundred and sixty-four was still there, but was loose. The page began with one of the standard prayers to Moradin, written in Auld Dethek. The runes were scribed in a small cramped hand that made them difficult to read. Torrin had to decipher the prayer rune by rune. Grant me the strength of heart, O Moradin, to do something good this day. Something useful, something of lasting worth… Torrin knew the prayer by heart; he said it every morning. He skipped past it, to the bottom of the page. What was written there immediately caught his attention.

One of the lesser known wonders by which Moradin makes his blessings manifest upon Faerun is the River of Gold. Glory to those who cross its ever-changing path! For not only shall they bask in Moradin’s presence, but shall be rewarded with riches the like of which have not been seen on Faerun since the coming of our people to this Realm! But beware, treasure seekers, the River of Gold is a difficult vein to tap. Use only stone vessels to draw from its current, for it melts all base metals that come in contact with it.

Torrin paused, thinking. A river of molten gold? He’d had never heard of such a thing. Gold might be melted by proximity to a volcano, perhaps-or by the breath of a red dragon, or by spellfire-but once it flowed away from the source of the heat, it cooled and hardened. It didn’t keep flowing through all the earth like a river. That wasn’t possible. Or was it?

He leaned forward to read on, his arms crossed. His right hand rested atop his left bracer, his fingers picking at the groove in it. The groove wasn’t sharp-edged, but smooth, like a line traced through sand. A groove made by flowing water.

Or by flowing gold?

He thought back to the piece of hardened gold he’d plucked from his scorched sleeve. Had it come from the River of Gold?

He picked up the magical runestone, the hairs on the back of his neck shivering erect. He could almost feel the Dwarffather standing beside him, watching. Waiting.

He was on to something-something important. Another piece of the puzzle that the dream-Moradin had urged him to unearth. He placed the runestone back on the table and read on eagerly.

No map exists of the River of Gold, nor will it ever be found in the same location twice. It flows as the Dwarffather wills. It ever must be hunted anew, in the deepest and most remote regions of the earth. It alters course continually, from channel to channel, following the magical conduits that were forged, eons ago, at the time the gods themselves first took form. Some runemasters claim to be able to direct its flow, to temporarily pull…

There, the text ended, at the bottom of the page. The page that should have followed was missing-as were fully a dozen other pages. They’d been deliberately removed, by the look of it. The threads that had held the signature in place were cleanly cut, and there was a small nick at the inside edge of the page that followed, likely made when the signature was cut free.

Torrin flipped pages, hoping to find another reference to the mysterious River of Gold, but the rest of the book contained only prayers and notes on caverns of great natural beauty. Nor was there any mention of earth nodes, or, for that matter, of the Soulforge. Just that one cryptic reference to a river of molten gold that flowed through the earth in a constantly shifting vein.

A vein that could, he was willing to wager, be “pulled” to any spot on Faerun by the runestone that lay on the table in front of him.

Torrin stared at the runes carved into the stone. “Earth magic,” they read. The runestone, he decided, must act like a lodestone, drawing not one but two sets of magical “filings” to it: the wild magic of spellfire, and the River of Gold. But only, it would seem, when it was activated within the magical lines of force that crisscrossed Faerun and converged to form earth nodes.

Any other dwarf might immediately have turned his thoughts to the limitless wealth the runestone could convey. Torrin, however, was delving deeper than that.

He thought about what he’d learned so far.

Someone-likely some enemy of the dwarves-had invoked the powerful curse that caused the stoneplague. That curse might have been placed on any object. Copper coins, for example, would have been a better choice, since they’d guarantee a wide and rapid distribution throughout the dwarf settlements. Yet the spellcaster had chosen the noblest metal of all. Why?

The answer might be as simple as the fact that dwarves coveted gold, something the caster of the curse would have in abundance. Armed with the runestone and the missing pages from the book, the spellcaster had called the River of Gold, tapped it, and cast the gold into bars, before fouling them with the curse.

Kendril, the dwarf Torrin had purchased the runestone from, was likely the one who’d removed the pages from the book. His brother had mentioned that Kendril came to Sundasz to study after their falling-out. Kendril had been a cleric at the time; he would have had an interest in such texts. The prospect of wealth without limit must have tempted him. And somehow, the secret Kendril had uncovered in that book wound up in the hands of the person who’d cursed the gold. Later, after Kendril realized the use the pages had been put to, he’d felt remorse for his role in creating the stoneplague. But instead of reporting what he’d done, he’d stolen the runestone and sold it, so that his own clan might be saved.

Given Kendril’s affliction, he was probably an unwitting pawn, unaware until it was too late that a curse had been placed upon the gold. Which explained Kendril’s deep remorse. A dwarf, Torrin knew, would never willingly condemn his race to so dire a fate.

Vadyr, as well, was likely only a minion of whoever had cursed the gold. If he’d been powerful enough to invoke a ritual capable of producing so strong a curse, he would have used magic to lay Torrin low, not a rogue’s sap.

There was someone else-some powerful wizard-lurking in the shadows behind those two. Torrin was certain of it.

That was all well and good, but it still left Torrin wondering what to do next. The puzzle, like the one Frivaldi had challenged Torrin to solve, seemed no closer to a solution, despite the fact that more than one link had just fallen into place.

One thing was certain, however. Torrin’s runestone was a lot more valuable than he’d thought. Literally priceless, since using it could make a person wealthy beyond even the greediest prospector’s wildest dreams.

He idly gave the runestone a twist, and listened to it rasp against the tabletop as it spun. Which direction next, he wondered? Back to the Wyrmcaves or some other earth node, to try once more to teleport to Vadyr? On to Helmstar to make enquiries about Kendril, to see whom he’d associated with there? Whatever course of action Torrin embarked upon next, he’d have to be as stealthy as a rogue, even with the brooch the Lord Scepter had given him pinned inside his shirt. As soon as word got out of the runestone’s capabilities-which it surely would given that Torrin had told Zarifar about it-Vadyr wouldn’t be the only rogue going after it.

That raised a question. Why hadn’t other rogues tried to grab the runestone? Surely the wizard who’d invoked the curse had enough gold to hire every rogue on Faerun, and could have sent countless hirelings on Torrin’s trail. The only answer Torrin could think of was that Vadyr must have gotten greedy. Rather than telling his master the location of the runestone, he’d made a grab for it himself.

If that was what had happened, whoever had cast the curse might not know about Torrin yet.

Dumathoin grant that it stays that way, Torrin thought.

He caught the spinning stone, halted it, then spun it in the other direction. Caught it, and spun it again the other way, watching its shadow wobble across the tabletop. Caught it and…

Suddenly, he realized the answer.

“Of course,” he said, grinning at himself for sounding like Zarifar. “The opposite direction.”

He tucked the runestone into his pack, where it would be safer, and hurriedly departed from the library.